Wednesday

Nokia Alleges Infringement by HTC, RIM, Viewsonic

If you’re struggling to beat them, you might take a shot at suing them for patent infringement, or so it goes with Nokia today. The Finnish OEM announced patent suits filed against HTC, Research In Motion (RIM) and Viewsonic in the U.S. and Germany, alleging violation of a number of patents. Louise Pentland, chief legal officer at Nokia, said in a statement that the company has already licensed its standards essential patents to more than 40 companies. “Though we’d prefer to avoid litigation, Nokia had to file these actions to end the unauthorized use of our proprietary innovations and technologies, which have not been widely licensed,” Pentland said. Nokia’s actions include a complaint to the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) against HTC; suits against HTC and Viewsonic in the Federal District Court of Delaware; against HTC and RIM in the Regional Court in Dusseldorf, Germany; and against all three companies in the Regional Courts in Mannheim and Munich, Germany. In total, 45 Nokia patents are in suit in one or more of the actions. Nokia says that patents are being used by RIM, HTC and Viewsonic to enable hardware capabilities such as dual function antennas, power management and multimode radios, as well as to enhance software features including application stores, multitasking, navigation, conversational message display, dynamic menus, data encryption and retrieval of email attachments on a mobile device. “Many of these inventions are fundamental to Nokia products,” Pentland said. “We’d rather that other companies respect our intellectual property and compete using their own innovations, but as these actions show, we will not tolerate the unauthorized use of our inventions.”

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